What Happened With Lou Dobbs

Frances M. Roberts / Newscom The controversial CNN anchor’s abrupt exit took even his staff by surprise. Lloyd Grove and Rebecca Dana on the relief, sadness and job scramble at the studio.

The abrupt resignation of CNN’s resident nativist firebrand, Lou Dobbs, was greeted with surprise and relief today by his colleagues at the cable network—and with triumphant celebration by Dobbs’ many liberal detractors, who took credit for forcing the anchorman’s departure.

The sudden end of Lou Dobbs Tonight after six years—which Dobbs quietly negotiated in recent weeks with CNN/U.S. President Jonathan Klein—releases him from the last two years of his CNN contract, said to be valued at around $2.5 million a year. It also leaves around 30 of Dobbs’ staffers unemployed and desperately scrambling to reapply for jobs at CNN.

“I can’t talk to you right now because I’m trying to help find places for people,” Dobbs’ longtime executive producer, Jim McGinnis, said this morning in a brief phone conversation. According to a source at the network, CNN security guards were on hand Wednesday night to assure that there were no incidents after the final show, and Dobbs and Klein’s termination agreement had been kept so secret that Lou Dobbs Tonight segment producers were still booking guests for future shows mere hours before the final curtain. Another source said that the network would cover Dobbs staffers’ salaries through February.

“This is something that almost everybody has wanted to have happen for quite some time,” a highly placed CNN employee said. “Lou Dobbs made no sense on CNN.”

CNN staffers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the 63-year-old Dobbs—who announced his swan song on the air with a typically dramatic flourish—had increasingly become an irritant in CNN’s prime-time schedule, an embarrassing anomaly on a network that purports to offer straight, down-the-middle journalism, unlike the opinion-dominated Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

“This is something that almost everybody has wanted to have happen for quite some time,” a highly placed CNN employee said. “Lou Dobbs made no sense on CNN. We were trying to make a case for journalism and you people in the media were calling us hypocrites because there was Lou at 7 p.m.—and rightly so. From a business perspective, it made sense to keep Lou when his ratings were high, but they aren’t anymore, and they haven’t been for awhile. It was hard to justify why he would fit into the CNN brand.”

An internal CNN email sent by a staffer to the booking producers painted a different picture. “It’s a big thing when the last remaining anchor moves on. The outcome was a lot more dramatic than the process was. It is a big headline, but I will tell you that throughout the convos, he was classy and analytical about the whole thing. As you know, he tried to fit into the overall positioning of our network (non-partisan, non-opinionated) and changed his show tremendously recently for doing that. He finally decided that the advocacy journalism is what he wanted to do. It was all very amicable. Throughout he showed the love he has for CNN and the respect he has for everyone here.” The email was read over the phone to The Daily Beast by a source who received it.

The announcement that Dobbs will be replaced in the time slot by journeyman journalist John King, the anchor of CNN’s Sunday show State of the Union, should solve the hypocrisy problem, this CNNer said. “John may not be the most riveting television in the world, but it makes sense now. Finally, it is the CNN journalistic brand from Wolf Blitzer, to John King, to Campbell Brown, to Anderson Cooper.”

In recent months, Dobbs, who tightly controlled the content of his program as managing editor, has championed such trademark causes as economic nationalism and restricting foreign immigration, and generously gave a platform to such fringe political movements such as “birther” conspiracy theorists who erroneously claim that Barack Obama is an illegitimate president because he wasn’t born in the United States.